Sunday, July 05, 2015
Coming of age
It is hard not to personalize films that come close enough to feel their breath on my neck.
gets pretty close.
Julianne Moore plays a woman who has early onset Alzheimers. Somehow they are able to do this without becoming all clinical about it. More human.
The thing that I have always feared is that I would know when this was happening to me and would be powerless to do anything about it.
The old word was "dementia". But that is a general term. Alzheimers is an identifiable genetic disease which has predictable results. Incurable, it has a downward progression which is irreversible.
I think that it must be difficult to make a film about something like this. Not make it a horror show and, on the other side of it, not to candy coat it.
I think there me a bit of candy coat here but that is OK with me. Moore does a great job in allowing us to see through the disease and to see that she is still Alice.
Alex Baldwin is great as the husband and Kristen Stewart is kinda the star as the struggling actor daughter who comes home to be with her Mom.
No soap opera here. Some tears of course. But still, warm and beautiful and, after all, human just as this whole experience is for a family.
As far as I know, I am safely beyond the point where this will happen to me. And even if it does strike, it will be something else that probably gets me first.
Another example of all the stuff we worried about happening not happening.
It is hard to rate this by my normal criteria. I will give it a 4 even though I do not think I would want to see it again if on offer. But then, I will have to bow to the system and give it a 3. Good enough. But once is enough.
